The Devil I Know: My Haunting Journey with Ronnie DeFeo and the True Story ofthe Amityville Murders (25 page)

Joanne dove into the files, looking for corroboration of any sort. There was none. But then, I supposed there wouldn’t be if no one had noticed.

“Ronnie, this is the first time you’ve ever said this.”

“I know that.”

“Why haven’t you ever mentioned it before?”

“What good was it gonna do me?”

“What good is it going to do you now?”

“I ain’t telling you this because it’s going to do me any good. I ain’t telling you any of this because of that. I’m telling it to you because I want it out of me. That’s all.”

As it was with so many of Ronnie’s claims, I had no reason to believe him. I also had no reason not to. “Did you just leave the house, or did you shower first?”

“I didn’t take no shower. Like I said, I changed my clothes, because I couldn’t go to work all filthy and with blood on my clothes, but forget about taking a shower. There was only time to change. How could I go back to work with the same clothes that I had on? It just wouldn’t look right. Them clothes were dirty and smelly from sweating, and then there’s the blood. Plus I was too shocked to take a shower.”

“How long did you stay in the house?”

“I had to find the file, the second set of books. I had to find them, because the police woulda came in and found them. My father had it taped with a folder, underneath one of the drawers. I had to take all the drawers
out. So I took them out, and I found it. It was in a plastic bag, taped with duct tape. And I took it. Son of a bitch hadn’t been paying taxes on a dime of it. I still had the rest of my guns in the car so I could get rid of them. I didn’t want the cops finding any guns at all in that goddamn house.”

“What did you do with the bloody clothes?”

“I drove to Brooklyn and threw the pillowcase down a storm drain in Seaview, in the suburbs, by the hamburger joint, Gary’s Hamburger. Charcoal burger place. Right by Rockaway Parkway.”

“And the pistol that Dawn had—?”

“I drove to Charlie’s house. Charlie Brooks. That was my best friend. The black guy that testified at my trial. Member of the Black Panthers—they called him the Bear. Charlie would do whatever for me, we liked each other. I hid the pistol in the basement of his apartment building, behind a set of pipes. He had no idea what it had been used for, but he figured it had been used for something. Otherwise, why would I be so concerned about hiding the thing? He saw the gun had been fired, he knew it had been used for something.”

“What about your other guns?”

Ronnie listed all the guns he owned, which he remembered in great detail. “Every gun that I owned went to Charlie’s house. The only ones I couldn’t get out were the ones on the gun rack. I had a gun rack in my room. I couldn’t rip it off the wall. It had two guns. A single-barrel shotgun that my mother signed for in Ithaca and a .22 Marlin, semiautomatic, like an M1. I couldn’t get
that rack off the wall, so those guns stayed. But I took a 30-06 Remington DGL. That was a three-hundred-dollar gun. I took a 12-gauge pump Mossberg. I took a 12-gauge Ithaca Deerslayer. I took a brand-new .44 Magnum. That’ll shoot through an engine block. It had two fourteen-shot clips. I took the .357. I took a .25 automatic. And I took all the ammunition. Boxes. I’m gonna tell you, I had, no exaggeration, two hundred, maybe three hundred rounds of ammo.” He added, pragmatically, “They were on sale.”

“Did Charlie bust your chops about the fact that you’re asking to stash all these guns at his place?”

“I woke him up. I gave him some of the money in exchange for this favor. I’m trying to think how much money I gave him. I think three thousand. I said, ‘Here, this is for you and your wife.’ I said, ‘Make sure you tell Angie I gave you some money.’ He said, ‘You messing with my wife?’ She was a pretty black girl. I said, ‘No, I ain’t messing with your wife.’ He told me he was only kidding. I said, ‘Make sure you take care of the kids, buy them all stuff.’ Yeah, that’s what it was, two thousand at first, then I gave him another thousand and told him to take care of Angie and the kids. Three thousand dollars. That was out of my own money, out of the thirty-seven thousand. We hid all the guns down in the boiler room, in the basement, with the pistol. Then we locked the room and left.”

I looked at the file. Charlie Brooks had taken the stand, but unlike most of the witnesses called, he built Ronnie DeFeo up rather than tearing him down.

“Charlie testified at your trial.”

“On my behalf, not theirs. He didn’t tell them I was at his house or that I had the guns or any of it. He just stood up for my character, said, ‘That man did not kill his family. Butch’s father was very violent, but Butch wouldn’t have done this.’ Charlie used to take me down to the black neighborhoods where white people can’t normally go. He’d say, ‘This is Butch Brigante.’ He figured if he dropped the name Brigante it would give me more cred. ‘Do not fuck with him. If anything happens to him, you’re gonna have to deal with me.’ We’d go from place to place. Charlie and his friends would say, ‘Buy Butch a drink,’ and they’d do it. They liked me down there. I met this black girl there from the Marcy Avenue Projects. She was a fox. You have to be out of your mind to go in there white. I was going in there picking her up.”

“Did Charlie know about the extent of your troubles with your father?”

“Of course. He knew how abused I was. Charlie had nothing but trouble with my father, too. The whole time he worked for him.” I wondered if Charlie Brooks had stuck up for Ronnie not because he believed Ronnie was innocent but because he knew what a punching bag Ronnie had been for his father; maybe he’d figured Ronnie’s actions were, on some level, justified.

“Is Charlie still alive?”

“No, he’s dead now. He was forty-three at the time.”

“A forty-three-year-old man was a twenty-three-year-old kid’s best friend?”

“Why not?”

I decided to leave it alone. I’d seen stranger matchups.

“He would have been more than eighty years old now. Do you ever think about that?”

“Sure. I think about Charlie all the time. He told me right from the get-go, ‘You have any problems in prison, you let me know immediately.’ I said, ‘No, it’s all right, I know all the black guys. Except they’re all junkies.’ ”

“Ronnie, did anyone ever find that Magnum? The pistol?”

“No, never. Charlie told me he wasn’t getting rid of it. I said, ‘Charlie, the gun was just used in a murder.’ He told me not to worry, said he could do something to the barrel, maybe take the twist out. I said, ‘Sure, whatever.’ They had six kids. He cleaned the gun, scratched off the serial number, and had someone sell it on the street. That gun is gone.”

“Where did you go after Charlie’s?”

“I went back to Long Island, back to work. I spent the day at the dealership. Although I went to the luncheonette once it opened, you know, to get some more people to see me.”

“Ronnie, when Dawn was still alive and you were looking to dump the money—at that point you’re out of the house, the kids are dead—did you ever think she’s blasting music, the neighbors saw you with the rifle in the window, what would happen if the cops walked in at that point and the kids are all dead and she’s prancing around?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what she woulda did. Ain’t too much you can do.”

“How stoned was she?”

“Every month I would buy a 35-millimeter vial of angel dust from a local guy for her. This was the real good stuff, the stuff made with ether. Smelled like spearmint. I tried it, it was good. And the reefer was always excellent.”

“You bought the stuff for her?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“So she wouldn’t have to go out and get it by herself. You meet some dangerous people in that world. I didn’t want her going to see those kinds of people alone.”

“Where did you go after work, Ronnie?”

“I left work early. Early afternoon. And I came back in the direction of the house. I kept driving by it. I ran into Duchek, right outside my house. He asks where was I last night. I said where were you last night. He drove off, and I drove off. That was the conversation. They kept bringing that up at my trial.”

“But you didn’t go in?”

“I didn’t want to go in the house during the daytime. Kept driving right by it but didn’t go in. Duchek has the audacity, right in the middle of the street, to ask me where was I. See, we’d had a falling out, a big thing, on September 26, about the fact that he was stealing checks from my family, from the dealership. Our relationship had stopped after that. Him and them checks, man. He was robbing our dealership so he could support his habit.”

“Is that true? Can you prove it?”

“What do you want me to prove? It’s fact.”

Most of what Ronnie told me he also claimed as fact. That didn’t mean it was. The public record included the
information that Ronnie had run into Duchek during the day following the murders. The rest of the details, as usual, couldn’t be backed up.

“I told him, ‘You don’t have to rob nothing; your family has money, plus you work.’ He was a stonemason for his father’s business. I told him, ‘Look, whether you show up or not, you got a paycheck.’ His father did just fine. What does Duchek need to go stealing for?”

“Where did you end up after you saw Duchek?”

“I went to Mindy’s house.”

I looked at the file. Mindy Weiss was a girl in the neighborhood who Ronnie spent time with. His girlfriend, if such a term could be applied.

“I think I took her shopping, I can’t remember where, could have been Massapequa; then we wound up at her house. She wanted to fool around, but I didn’t really have it in me. We started in a bit, but I didn’t have no sex. I told her I wasn’t in the mood. That shit was all going through my mind; I was trying to get rid of it. I was drinking, but the booze didn’t do nothing. I called my house while I was there, so she’d see me do it. My mother would have been home that time of day, so that’s when I called. And Marc had a broken leg from playing football. There was a lot of animosity about that. My father, of course, blamed me for him getting his leg broken. Now how do you explain that it’s my fault my brother broke his leg? It was during a goddamn football game. I went to the hospital with him, but I was drunk, in the emergency room. My father started a fight with me about that. That goddamn guy.”

“How long did you shack up at Mindy’s?”

“I was with her for a couple of hours, then I told her I gotta go.”

“Did you give her a reason?”

“Nah. I just said, ‘Look, I gotta get going.’ She asked me if I’d be coming over that night. I said, ‘Hey, you remember when I got caught in your house and your father and mother started screaming and I had to run out of the house getting dressed? Well, we ain’t gonna go through that again. I had to send your mother a dozen roses to get back on her good side.’ Mindy had two different apartments. Guess who was paying the rent on them? Yeah, me. The second one had a bathroom but no shower. It had a fireplace, a bar, everything else, but no shower. I said, ‘What good is this? I come over here and have sex—I gotta go home stinking. I gotta walk by your father and hear his mouth. It’s a joke.’ ”

“If it was her apartment, why would you see her dad there?”

“Because parents come by to see their kids. Parents do that.”

This was just one of the times I thought I’d caught an inconsistency in one of Ronnie’s stories and had tried to call him on it. He’d have an answer ready every time. Were they the answers of a great actor quick on his feet? Maybe I was wrong, but I didn’t think so.

“So she gave that up and went back home with her parents. That’s how I got caught having sex with her in her room. Then we started having sex in the den downstairs, so we could hear if anybody was coming. That broad, I
ain’t gonna lie to you, she was experienced, she knew more than I knew. She said she’d had a good teacher. Then I had to get even, you know, the masculinity comes out, she said, ‘Oh, whoa, you gotta stop, I can’t take no more.’ That girl, I’ll tell you, I ain’t gonna lie, that girl knew more about sex than any broad I ever been with. I was with a lot of married women then, and she still knew more.”

“Did she have any idea what was going on?”

“No, I didn’t say nothing about it. After I left her place, I stopped in at Henry’s Bar, the one at the corner of Ocean and Merrick, just to scope it out and see who was hanging out there.”

“Did you have a drink?”

“Yeah. And I didn’t drink no vodka and 7UP. I was a scotch drinker. Dewar’s on the rocks. But I couldn’t get drunk that night even if I tried. I called the house in front of everyone, so they’d see me. I was letting everyone know I was pretty worried ’cause I’d been calling the house all day and no one was answering. I also told them I didn’t have my front door keys and had no way to get in.”

“Did you have a plan in mind?”

“My mind was going crazy with the shit that had happened. I didn’t have no plan. I was just doing one thing and then the next thing. I was figuring it out as I went. I decided to leave the bar. I went to Janet and Andy McCormack’s house and got high. They lived in a small apartment in Amityville. That broad was a big dope fiend, big heroin addict. We had sex once. I bought a lot of dope from her that night, before I called the police. That was a mistake, boy. A hundred dollars on donk dope.”

Joanne placed the file on the desk in front of me, with a particular page sticking out. It was the page referring to Janet McCormack, who had indeed testified at the trial. Butch DeFeo had come to her apartment that evening and gotten high, Janet had said. She’d also noted that Butch was regularly violent and had rage issues. And then she had stepped down.

“So you bought the dope from Janet…”

“I gave her fifty and said, ‘I’ll give you the other fifty in a little while.’ I was stoned outta my face when the police finally got to the house. I was stoned when they had me in the precinct.”

“Ronnie, when you went to get high, did you ever think, ‘Maybe I should just turn myself in?’ ”

“I didn’t know what to think or what to say to who. I just knew I didn’t want to go back to that house.”

“Why not?”

“I couldn’t deal with it. I wanted to make believe it didn’t happen.”